On top of the world, and looking up

To explain ALMA, I will borrow the tagline from www.almaobservatory.org : "The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile, is the largest astronomical project in existence. ALMA will be a single telescope of revolutionary design, composed initially of 66 high precision antennas located on the Chajnantor plateau, 5000 meters altitude in northern Chile."

Driving to ALMA.  The OSF is an isolated community in the mountains towards the right.

The largest project, a huge international collaboration, and pushing the limits of astronomical technology.  To me it sounded fascinating enough, and that was even before I arrived to the driest desert in the world to begin my first shift at the Operations Support Facility (OSF).  To arrive at the OSF, I took a 2 hour flight from Santiago to Calama, an important mining city in northern Chile.  Then, an ALMA bus drove us two more hours, through San Pedro de Atacama (a dusty tourist town, with population of about 2000 people), up to the OSF at an elevation of about 10000 feet above sea level.


From the OSF, the telescope array (at 5000 meters elevation) can be controlled remotely, in addition to testing antennas, engineering, and other telescope operations.  The environment here is unique, with somewhere between 400 to 600 people "living" at the OSF at any given time, including scientists, engineers, telescope operators, and other staff.  I think it's a great work environment, considering that every single person here is dedicated to the operation of this observatory, 24 hours a day.  

My home for 8 days.

Several shifts, and many jobs go into making this telescope function.  For this week, I'll have a day shift, meaning I work from about 1 pm until midnight on several projects related to "Commissioning and Science Verification (CSV)" (in other words, making sure the telescope is working as expected) and "Early Science" (the first scientific observations to be proposed and made, now that a portion of the telescope array is in operation).  Others work night shifts, or morning shifts.  The dorms have shades on the windows, so you can sleep at any time of the day or night, and signs around the dorm buildings remind you to be very quiet at all hours.  In general, it appears very comfortable in the little ALMA village, with nice accomodations, a "casino" (which means cafeteria, in Chile), exercise facilities, and more.


I can give more details of what I actually do here as I get more involved.  For now, I just wanted to communicate some of my excitement in being involved with a project of such grand scope.  In the words of the ALMA Director, Thijs de Graauw: “We are living in a historic moment for science and particularly for astronomy, and perhaps also for the evolution of humanity, because we start to use the greatest observatory under construction at the moment.”